2011/06/19

Introduction

In my current Cordys project I am using the Cordys Cloud Provisioning (CCP) functionality of Cordys. I am very excited about this produkt and this blog item I will share my knowledge about it.

First I will explain something about provisioning.

What is Provisioning?

Provisioning is the process of managing Organizations (also called Tenants) and Users to let them use Applications. It manages the usage of applications that can be used as SaaS applications by tenants. It can be used to create new business models. Cordys has made a separate package for this, on top of BOP4 called CCP.

With CCP it is possible (among others):

Managing Cordys-Applications and non-Cordys applications

Managing of Tenants

Managing of Users and Roles

Keeping track of the usage of the Applications (Metering)

Some Terminology

The next picture shows the Cordys-ecosystem.

A Tenant makes use of SaaS applications that are delivered by a PaaS. These applications are developed by Apps Provider (ISV).

A Tenant Admin manages Users and Applications for a tenant. The End User is a user that uses the applications. A Sales Channel is a channel that sells applications for ISVs to other tenants.

Cordys is multi-tenant in the core

The nice part of Cordys is that the Cordys core is Tenant aware. This means that all usage of applications is done in the context of a tenant (in Cordys this is an Organization). Applications developed with Cordys must be made tenant aware. The result is that application data will have tenant info associated with it. In fact an Organization can be seen as a "container" with its own users, applications and security context. This way tenants can not use data of other tenants. Users can only access an organization if it has a Role in that Organization.

CCP Applications

Applications can be used by tenants and are defined in Cordys with CCP. Applications are defined with the use of ISV packages. For each Application the available Roles can be defined. You can define provisioning processes, properties and custom UIs that are being executed in case an organizations and/or users take a subscription.

Some example screens when defining a new Application through CCP.

Defining Roles.

Conclusion

Cordys is the only BPM produkt I know of, that has SaaS features within the core of the produkt. CCP is a fairly new addon to the Cordys BOP4 platform, but I expect a lot from it.